Tag: Science fiction

Nancy Kress is one of science fiction’s crown jewels. She is a writer of powerful science fiction, having won Hugos and Nebulas. She also is known as a talented writing teacher.

September’s issue of sf and fantasy magazine Galaxy’s Edgehas an insightful interview by the wildly talented author. To read her own personal thoughts on her career (and to access the full interview) you can click the magazine link to see the many options available for buying this wonderful 28th issue.

To whet your appetite here is an exclusive excerpt:

Joy Ward: How did you get started writing?

Nancy Kress: By accident. I had never planned on being a writer. When I was a child, I thought all writers were dead because the writers I was reading were Louisa May Alcott. I really did not realize that writing was a commodity that was still being produced. I thought it was like oil, there was a finite amount of it.

Then I discovered that there were actual writers living and this completely shocked me, but I come from a very conservative Italian-American family, and I grew up in the 1950s. So my mother sat me down when I was 12 and said, “Do you want to be a teacher, a nurse, or a secretary?” Because those were the only possible things she could think of, and I thought it over and I said, “Okay, I’ll be a teacher.” So I became a fourth grade teacher, and I was for four years. I enjoyed it. Then I got married and had my children. I was pregnant with my second child. We lived way out in the country. There were no other women at home. They were all older and had gone back to work. My then husband took our only car to work, and he was taking an MBA, so he often didn’t come home for dinner; he stayed for classes. I was there with my one-year-old- 18-month-year-old, very difficult pregnancy, and I was going nuts.

I started writing to have something to do that didn’t involve Sesame Street, and I didn’t take it seriously. It was a thing I was doing while the baby was napping, to try to have something of my own. I would send them out. They’d come back. I’d send them out they’d come back. After a year, one sold. After another year, a second one. After another year a third one sold, then it started to pick up and I began to take it more seriously, but I didn’t plan on doing this.

I remember (selling the first story) very well. It was to Galaxy, which is a magazine long-defunct. What I didn’t know is that everybody else had stopped submitting to Galaxy because it was trembling on the verge of bankruptcy. I had no connection with fandom. I didn’t know it existed, I didn’t know SFWA existed. I didn’t know conventions existed. When I first sold it, it turned out that nobody else was submitting anything, and they were desperate. So they published my story immediately then it went bankrupt. It took me three years to get my $105. I wanted it, and I kept writing and I’d say, “This is my first sale. I want my $105.” And for that eventually I think he had pity and he sent me the check.

I did it. I did that was what goes through my mind. Three words, “I did it.” I didn’t think I could, but I did it.

For many years science fiction got a really bad rap. It was fantastical fiction of no substance, a poor relation to literary fiction, or to any other kind of fiction (except maybe romance); it was often considered a flight of fancy. But mainstream readers are starting to realize that science fiction novels, TV shows and movies are often social commentary on the human condition. And not only that, they can often be thought-provoking and moving allegories of our current lives, helping us confront the parts of ourselves we probably need to work on and improve if we are ever to have a successful future as individuals or a species.

While SF movies have always evoked a sense of “what if” in terms of considering how we could end up if we made X choice instead of Y (The Planet of the Apes films are perfect examples of this!), when you read SF novels you are free to picture the future the author’s presents with your own imagination, often making the resulting lesson more profound.

So, who is the most influential SF author in your opinion? We’d love to find out whose writing affects our readers the most!

It’s that time of the year again. Time to nominate our favorite science fiction and fantasy works (in different forms, lengths and mediums), as well artists, editors and writers in professional and fan categories.

The deadline is at 06:59 UTC on March 18, 2017 (March 17, 2017 23:59 North American Pacific Daylight Time / UTC-7) and if you have the required membership and voting pin, you can still use the personalized link in the email you received to cast your vote. (I suspect it is too late to mail in a paper ballot, unless you do so via express post.)

Anyone who is a voting member of the 2016, 2017, or 2018 Worldcons by the end of the day on January 31, 2017, is eligible to nominate in this round, but only members of the Helsinki Worldcon can vote on the chosen finalists in the next round, so make your vote count now! Click here to go to the current worldcon website to find out more.)

There are professional and personal blogs and websites around the net listing eligible nominees, for all the categories, and if you click here (for example) you will be taken to a webpage that invites people to suggest their own recommendations, which have been compiled into very helpful lists for each category. No website has a complete list of all eligible works, but some of them might jog your memory, if you recognize a particular book or story on one of them that you had read last year and realized it was definitely worth your vote. (We have such hectic, multi-tasking lives that I suggest that, in the future, you create a list and add to it whenever you read something new during a calendar year, so you can refer back to it during nomination periods.)

This year the rules have been changed up a bit, in regards to how they tally their votes. While you can only nominate up to five titles/names per category, there will be six finalists per category once the numbers have been tallied and their legitimacy verified, to help prevent block voting.

Feel free to participate in the poll below. We’d love to here from you which book (or books) you believe should be nominated for the 2017 Hugo Award for Best Novel. Either by adding a new book title (and the author who wrote it) to the poll list options, or by selecting one or more of the options already listed!

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The folks from Signals From TheEdge wish you a happier and brighter 2017!

Welcome to our blog! We aim to update you on all the books, movies and news within the science fiction, fantasy and horror fields. Click on the various buttons underneath to be kept updated on all the signals we send out!